Teaching Hard History Text Library

Welcome to the Teaching Hard History Text Library. This collection includes more than 100 primary sources selected to support robust teaching and learning about the Key Concepts and Summary Objectives found in A Framework for Teaching American Slavery. The texts are also mapped to the four domains of the Social Justice Standards. Each includes a set of text-dependent questions.

In this text, we learn about James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, who obtained his freedom only for a creditor to threaten him with enslavement. The text describes his experience working off his debt by privateering in the Caribbean while he expressed his dream to relocate to London, England.

Recounting a selective portion of an enslaved woman’s life, this brief biography also serves as a reflection of what mainstream society deemed “worthy” during the early to mid-19th century. Precisely because Alice supposedly embodied characteristics that were both exceptional and ordinary, her story offers a useful lens to consider how slavery was understood in its time.

A Democratic laborer comments on the problem of abolitionism in the North as well as the South, claiming that the emancipation of enslaved people will result in the damaging of white labor rights and opportunities.

With this text, the colony of Rhode Island outlawed the importation of enslaved Africans and established the immediate emancipation of enslaved people in the colony in 1774. However, the law stipulated some important exceptions that made this change particularly ineffective.